better business blog

Tips and stories to add value to you and your organisation

You Can Use Technology

9 January 2011

My glasses have been misbehaving. Not playing violent 18-rated games on XBox (which they’re too young for) or staying out late without telling me when they’d be home. No. Something much worse.

They’ve been slipping down my nose.

I know. Scandalous isn’t it.

When they gently descend and force me to peer out over the top of the rims I look like a patronising professor. I then have to push them back up, knowing they will soon defeat me once more. And you thought you had a tough life!

So to tell them who’s boss I popped into my local optician and had them sorted. They were given a stern talking to, made to sit in the naughty-glasses-case for five minutes and finally heated up and had their arms gently adjusted. They’re now a reformed character and back to doing their job properly.

During the course of their rehabilitation I learned that the optician’s daughter was currently writing a dissertation about Twitter. Amazing! Something that hardly existed two years ago is now a serious topic for academic research. She was writing about it’s usefulness as a marketing tool for publishing and ebook sales. Twitter has certainly helped me to sell books and it reminded me that if we want to be successful at selling products and services we need to attack all the routes to market.

It costs nothing to explore Twitter, other than some time and maybe a bit of nervous energy, as we wonder if people will want to follow us. Follow me at @RichardMaun and I’ll follow you back, all for free.

In my world of books it’s important to use tools like Twitter and YouTube to find customers and make them aware of my products. Thanks to the work of the actor known as Brian we’ve managed to generate more interest and more sales with the two short films he’s already starred in.

Continuing the theme from last week’s post, about what I did well in 2011, the discussion with the optician reminded me that new technology is here to stay and that I continued to do a good job of using it this year. Looking back over 2010 I gained over 1,000 newfollowers on Twitter, posted 2 videos on YouTube, set up a FaceBook fanpage for Job Hunting 3.0, developed the blogsite and posted each week and, perhaps the smartest thing; integrated it all with my much loved Blackberry. (Apologies to iPhones everywhere).

So when you look back on your success in 2011, which bits of technology did you use really well? Instead of dismissing it as ‘not for my business’ how did you make it work for you?

Remember; if we think we can’t…then we can’t. If we think we can…then we can.

Using technology for the good of our business, or our life, is about simply changing the can’t in our head to a can and then having a go. Technology is there to be used, whatever products or services your business provides. And I’m calling it technology because that is what it is; social media is just a current buzz-word for some of the content, but you still need a computer, smart phone, broadband connection and html coded website to link it all up and make it work.

And if my glasses misbehave again, technology will provide a solution. I’m going to have bionic eyes installed.

Tags: 2011, Facebook, Job Hunting, Twitter, YouTube

Welcome to 2012

2 January 2011

Well hello again and I hope that Crow did a good job of keeping my seat warm. He grumbles about getting a sore beak whenever I ask him to write the blog, but he likes it really and makes me wrestle the keyboard off him in the end. Birds eh!? They’re like children, except without the hopeful possibility that one day they will be fully house trained…

…But don’t tell him I said that, or he will get embarrassed.

So onwards!

The title up there isn’t a mis-print and here’s why:

Instead of looking forwards to 2011, we’re going to zoom ahead a whole 12 months and look back at our success and enjoy that feeling of having won through. It was easier than we thought too. Here we go…

Sit back and imagine it’s now January 2012 and that 2011 was a really successful year for us. Perhaps we found a great job, won lots of new customers, wooed the love of our life, or passed a tricky exam? We faced up to a challenge and we succeeded.

Now what was your challenge for 2011 and what was one thing that you did really well to make that success happen?

What did you have to do differently, or let go of, or bring into your world to make a big difference and act as a catalyst for success?

My challenge for 2011 was to find four new customers for the Outplacement side of Primary People. What I had to change was keeping this separate from my ILM Coaching Qualification so that people who were looking for work were able get a formal qualification at the same time. (This is a great way to build a strong CV and build confidence at interviews). And what I did was told people that they could have this as a package.

And then what I did was to find a finance mechanism which meant that people could get the skills they needed now, without having to spend their redundancy money, or savings, in one big gulp. This meant they could get round the Catch-22 of needing support to get a job and of not being able to afford it until they had a job. Been there! Got that t-shirt!

So that’s three things I did differently and I secured four new customers and laid the foundations for a great year.

I liked 2011, it went well.

What did you do to make it a success for you?

Tags: 2011, 2012, finance, ILM